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Vulcan

 - 5 dictionary results

Vul⋅can

[vuhl-kuhn]
–noun
1. the ancient Roman god of fire and metalworking, identified with the Greek Hephaestus.
2. Military. a six-barrel, 20mm U.S. Army antiaircraft gun system mounted on an armored personnel carrier and first deployed in 1968.
3. Astronomy. a hypothetical planet nearest the sun whose existence was erroneously postulated to account for perturbations in Mercury's orbit.

Origin:
1505–15; < L Vulcānus
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.
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Vul·can   (vŭl'kən)   
n.   Roman Mythology
The god of fire and metalworking.

[Latin Volcānus, Vulcānus.]
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Cultural Dictionary

Vulcan

[Greek name Hephaestus]

The Roman and Greek god of fire and metalworking; the blacksmith of the gods. He suffered bodily deformities and lameness. According to some stories, he was married to Venus, the goddess of love and beauty; in other stories, he was married to one of the three Graces. Vulcan was a son of Jupiter.

The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition
Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Word Origin & History

Vulcan 
god of fire and metal-work in Roman mythology, 1513, from L. Vulcanus, a word of Etruscan origin. Often with allusions to his lameness and the unfaithfulness of his wife, Venus. As the name of a hypothetical planet between Mercury and the Sun, it is attested from 1870. The Roman feast of Vulcanalia was on Aug. 23.
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper
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Computing Dictionary

VULCAN
1. A version of JPLDIS ported to CP/M by Wayne Ratliff around 1980. VULCAN evolved into dBASE II.
2. The dBASE-like interpreter and compiler sold by RSPI with their Emerald Bay product. [Same as 1?]
3. An early string manipulation language.
["VULCAN - A String Handling Language with Dynamic Storage Control", E.P. Storm et al, Proc FJCC 37, AFIPS, Fall 1970].
4. A concurrent object-oriented logic programming language implemented as a preprocessor for FCP by Kahn et al at Xerox PARC.
["Vulcan: Logical Concurrent Objects", K. Kahn et al in Research Directions in Object- Oriented Programming, A.B. Shriver et al eds, MIT Press 1987].
(2004-09-01)

The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © 1993-2007 Denis Howe
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